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How to change your life

Sometimes, I have someone I know come and tell me that they are facing a life changing decision - whether it is to quit their job and do something else, or move to live in a different country, or to break up with their significant other, or to fold their startup and start looking for a job. They bring it up and talk about it because they are deliberating the options, thinking about the consequences of making the decision. I have seen people take months to finally make some of these decisions.

Other times, I have someone I know come and tell me how they don't like things the way they are - be it about their fitness, or their inability to make progress on their side project, or their inability to wake up early. They bring it up and talk about it because they do not want to put in the effort to change it. The thought of starting and failing and returning back to where they started scares them even more than continuing with the way things are - which is square one.

In all these cases, they are looking for more facts to surface that will convince them that they have to act, or they are waiting for the odds to turn in their favour so that they can be less afraid of failing. In other words, they are telling themselves they aren't ready to make the change right now and are waiting to become ready.

Unfortunately, becoming ready for the change will never happen to us.

Instead, we just have to make the decision that we are ready and take the first step. However small it is.

When we're at our lowest, it is extremely hard to bring ourselves to act. It is far easier to convince ourselves that this is how things are going to be and that we had better get used to it. Or as has been gaining popularity in the recent times, we start being proud of who we are and embrace utter mediocrity.

We can always do better. Whether we're at our lowest or our highest, there is always room for things to be better.

And the path to better lies in making a decision. A decision that we are ready and then taking the first tiny step in that direction. Then another and then another.